Alan Donovan

@vermontgmg.bsky.social I agree with your AI piece. IMHO the main reason AI is useful in software is that the entire loop—define success, experiment, evaluate, iterate—takes place in a computer, so it is fast and lowish-risk, but in medical/legal work a mistake may cost you your client and license.

Oh, Spelling Bee: no TROUBADOR nor RUBATO, but BURRO? This is supposed to be the New York Times, not the Sonoran Agricultural Digest. Come on.

M. Gessen’s piece in the Times today recalled the 1991 stunt in which ACT-UP draped an enormous mock condom over Sen. Jesse Helms house. A brave act no doubt, but it‘s almost inconceivable today due to the grave risk of being shot. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

“Hockey” does not start with a bird homophone. That’s it, NYT Connections, I quit, even if it means I will miss next week’s soon-to-be-infamous Words I Made Up, Minus The Third Letter.

What's new in gopls 22: go.dev/gopls/release/v0.22.0 Please try it out: $ go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest

Some people post interesting stuff but... so much. Is there an alternative to “unfollow” such as rate limiting them to n posts per day?

Find out how the source-level inliner in Go 1.26 can help you with API migrations. go.dev/blog/inliner

Great essay from Hopkins on managerialism, conflicts of interest, the AI bubble, the decline of faculty governance, and how major donations paradoxically put universities in the red.

“Using go fix to modernize Go code” by Alan Donovan — https://go.dev/blog/gofix #golang

“Go 1.26 is released” by Carlos Amedee, on behalf of the Go team — https://go.dev/blog/go1.26 #golang

Idea for innovative new California law: A tech company must work as hard to remove you as a lapsed customer as they did to woo you as a non-customer. I can't want to see invasive pop-up ads on every web page saying "Alan, you haven't watched Hulu for nearly a month... click here to unsubscribe."

I feel obliged to disclose my first-ever success with vibe coding. Yesterday I got Gemini to build this tool to aid comprehension of musical rhythm: morpho.blog/subdiv/subdi... (If on iPhone, be sure your phone is not in silent mode.) Took about 2 hours. Would have taken me a (fun) day.

@davidcrespo.bsky.social I have really been enjoying your posts, BTW, which have forced me to confront many of my AI-hating priors. (Still hate AI but at least now I recognize some of my irrationality and goalpost-mobility!) So thanks.

What's new in gopls 21: go.dev/gopls/releas... Please try it out: $ go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest

Hi @erikdmartin.bsky.social 👋. Do you know when videos of this year's GopherCon talks are expected? Thanks.

@mattyglesias.bsky.social you say "movie tickets are in fact cheaper in real terms" after adjusting for inflation. But doesn't that just mean ticket prices grew less than the "basket" average? And if your wages grew even less than the average, then "cheaper, inflation adjusted" is no comfort at all.

Gopls v0.20.0 is released: go.dev/gopls/releas... $ go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@v0.20.0 Docs at go.dev/gopls. Thanks to all who contributed!

@jmmv.dev I liked your Bazel reproducibility post. I wonder: does Bazel have an option to try each build action twice and check consistency? This would make it easy to diagnose nondeterminism when you suspect it. CI systems could do it with some nonzero probability too.